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A Legendary Guidance Counselor Helps Seven Kids Find the Right Colleges---And Find Themselves
Penguin Press
August 2009
On Sale: July 23, 2009
272 pages
ISBN: 1594202141
EAN: 9781594202148
Hardcover
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Self-Help
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist spends a year with a
legendary high school guidance counselor who gets kids into
the right colleges by focusing on self-discovery rather
than test scores, grades, and the other traditional tools
of the trade Gwyeth Smith, known as Smitty, has made a national
reputation by flouting the conventions of the college
application ritual. He often steers kids from the SAT to
the ACT, which he considers a more straightforward test
that produces higher scores. He urges parents to home in on
hidden bargains, scour the country for scholarships, and
challenge financial aid offices rather than take out large
loans. He will sometimes talk a seeming shoo-in candidate
out of setting her sights on the prestigious Ivy League
while goading another long-shot student into aiming for
that same Ivy League school. His unorthodox approach is
grounded on the principle that getting into college
shouldnÂ’t just be about getting in; it should be a kidÂ’s
first great moment of self-discovery. David L. Marcus, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former education
writer for U.S. News & World Report, follows Smitty and
“his” kids around Oyster Bay High, a diverse public
school in Long Island, New York, as he works his unique
magic on their applications and their lives. SmittyÂ’s kids
run the gamut from the sweet but pathologically
disorganized boy next door to the valedictorian who applies
to twenty-eight schools. As the year unfolds, Smitty deals
in his own ingenious way with almost every complication
that can bedevil the applications process. What about the
kid who doesnÂ’t test well? The kid who plunges into
depression after being rejected by Columbia? The
overachieving Korean American boy worried about reverse
discrimination? Smitty has answers for all of them. While Smitty excels at easing the pressure of the college
hunt, his success comes from imposing a different—and
deeper—challenge. He makes kids articulate (orally and in
writing) their profoundest fears, their drawbacks, their
secret hopes. In short, he makes them figure out who they
are. Along the way, he uses his savantÂ’s knowledge of
AmericaÂ’s thirty-six hundred colleges and universities to
pair each student with the right one. He sidesteps the
applications industrial complex, with its slick Web sites,
private essay coaches, and obsessive focus on metrics. He
brings to the college search counterintuitive insight and
even wisdom—attributes that thousands of students and
their parents, frustrated with the excesses of the process,
will find useful and inspiring.
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